After Gilmans last book, the deliciously snarky and
wise Kiss My Tiara, I was expecting some choice riffing
on the symbolic white dress of this books title. But nowhere
do the ivory-clad icons of our history, say, Emily Dickinson
and Desdemona, dance on a bar doing Jello shots off each other.
Instead Hypocrite In A Pouffy White Dress is Gilmans
largely blissful coming-of-age memoir from her kindergarten obsession
with ballerinas to her pre-wedding days where, against the feminist
voices in her head, she falls in love with her pouffy reflection
in the mirror at Davids Bridal, and comes to one of her
superb conclusions: why did it take so long to have this
experience?...Every woman should see herself looking uniquely
breathtaking in something tailored to celebrate her body .

The childhood commentaries best capture her wit and offbeat
frankness. (Heres a standout: Gilman assesses the girlhood
fascination with the suffix ess as in princess,
countess, stewardess; notes her familys squeal of
delight when she says she wants to be a stewardess; wonders how
much theyd squeal if a beloved son pledged allegiance to
the service industry.) But the author seems to outgrow this capacity
for fun enlightenment by the time she writes about early adulthood.
A young womans experience of outsider-ness when a group
of lesbians mistake her for one of their own feels like a tired
sitcom plot; equally non-revelatory is the moment she decides
to take her work seriously at Jewish Week, despite the
fact its not The New Yorker.

Yet Gilman transforms the people in her life into characters
that crawl into the readers head and ransack the place:
theres Rhonda Shuggie, the bulimic pill-popper always up
for some mid-day fornication in the utility closet of her parents
coffee shop; theres Ida Shuggie, a bitter and misogynistic
entrepreneur; theres the heartbreakingly lost Ellen Gilman
after her husband leaves her, slowly trekking back to her status
as Formidable Woman. These characters are the real draw, even
when Gilman mingles them with her own less-enticing insights
right out of Memoir 101. (Do we care that the pubescent Gilman
could not see the complicated dimensions of Ida Shuggie, when
were still rankled by the woman herself, who says with
disdain to the teenage girl, You really think youre
equal to any man?)

In the chapter where the author meets Mick Jagger (another
of the occasional lyrical highlights, in which Jagger publicly
comments on her bountiful adolescent breasts), Gilman suggests
her scenario could have been written as a short story, and she
definitely possesses the creative know-how: when she strives
to be literary, her instincts are chic and voluptuous, and hint
at the kind of novel or short story collection this could have
been.